“Preserving Clermont Farm protects a vital link to the region’s agricultural and cultural heritage.”
Bob Stieg, CEO, The Clermont Foundation
Preservation at Clermont Farm
Preserving Clermont Farm means protecting not only its historic structures and landscapes, but also ensuring their relevance and usefulness to today’s community. As a cultural landscape shaped over 10,000 years, Clermont is preserved through active use, deep research, and educational partnerships that connect the past to the present.
Rethinking Historic Preservation
At Clermont, preservation is not about freezing time or maintaining a house as a static museum. It’s about protecting cultural assets from degradation while keeping them integrated into modern life. Preservation here reflects the full breadth of community history—not just elite narratives—and focuses on making the past meaningful and accessible for all.
A Living Cultural Landscape
Clermont is a rare example of a continuously evolving agricultural landscape shaped by Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans over millennia. Its preservation strategy restricts development that could compromise this historic character while also fostering opportunities to connect people to the land in meaningful, contemporary ways.
Working Farm, Teaching Site
Clermont remains a working farm, producing Angus beef cattle and Katahdin sheep on its pastureland, and corn on its cropland, and an active “third” herd of pollinators: honeybees. It also serves as a hands-on learning environment through a Community Agricultural Partnership with Clarke County Public Schools and the Clarke County Farm Bureau, offering agricultural instruction to local students in areas such as animal science, forage management, soil and water health, and land and wildlife conservation practices. Students help maintain demonstration practices such as riparian buffers and silvo-pasture plantings (developed in conjunction with Virginia Tech), benefiting both students and regional farmers (who come to classes offered by the Virginia Cooperative Extension).
Research & Education in History
On the historical side, Clermont collaborates regularly with the Department of Historic Resources and periodically with James Madison University and other regional universities on archaeological studies about both those structures which are no longer above ground and those which are, but whose foundations, walkways, drainways, etc. are threatened and need repair, which must be preceded by archaeology to avoid the loss to construction ground disturbance of any possible archaeological record. Architectural historians and students come to study Clermont’s architectural history. All the buildings serve as a single, continuously evolved study site, not a furnished museum, where exposed walls and structural features reveal the craftsmanship of 18th and 19th-century Chesapeake building types, as planted and developed on the frontier in the upland back-country. This hands-on research helps students explore the evolution of buildings and the intersection between historic and green building practices, supported by extensive documentation commissioned by the Clermont Foundation.
Preservation in Practice
Clermont is an example of historic preservation that’s forward-looking and community-centered. Repairs made to Clermont are used as permanent, observable, teaching demonstrations for good preservation practice. When a local citizen calls and tells us a contractor has recommended tearing out old log rafters in his house (“too old, sagging, still got bark on them”) at substantial expense, we invite that neighbor over to see how we kept the 200 year-old rafters (with bark on them) in the Slave Quarter, but gave them some modern support, at a fraction of the cost of tearing everything out, while saving an important part of the building’s past and a connection to those who built it.
People ask what kind of mortar they should use to preserve a specific masonry building. It depends on the construction period, what was there, how it’s been repaired in the past, what’s there now, to what extent the building needs to “breathe”, etc. At Clermont you can look at many examples and discuss the possibilities.
Preservation practice at Clermont remains rooted in its past while actively contributing to the educational, cultural, and economic life of its region—demonstrating that preservation is most powerful when it’s living, evolving, and engaged.